CLI Command examples on this page are always provided without the --application (shorthand -A) argument,
assuming you’re running these commands in a connected folder (at creation or using the dotcloudconnect command).
For more details on connected folders, see Migrating to the CLI 0.9.

There are a few cases where you would need to transfer files to and from
your servers:

you want to manually upload a bundle of confidential data that you don’t
want to put in your code repository;

you want to regularly update some data on your service, without having to
do a complete push each time (e.g., some JSON files containing stuff that
you want to update on a daily basis);

you want to transfer some user-uploaded data from your service to somewhere
else (another service, or a 3rd party server);

If your machine is not a Linux machine, please adjust the parameters
to the first base64 to avoid adding any line endings. On a Mac
this is the default. On a Linux machine (like your dotCloud container)
this requires -w0.

Note that this will create “localdirectory” in “/home/dotcloud” in the
remote server. If you want it with another name or at another place,
you can fix it manually with dotcloudrun, or use tar options to
specify the output directory.